Today a conversation sparked off on Twitter, started by Jimmy Bogard and Matt Hinze , and then carried on by myself and Glenn Block . The basic starting point was what the difference was between using an IoC container like Windsor or StructureMap and...

Tao is often referred to as 'the nameless', because neither it nor its principles can ever be adequately expressed in words. It is conceived, for example, with neither shape nor form, as simultaneously perfectly still and constantly moving, as...

As I have just been asked to prototype the front end application for the reference architecture that I have recently designed, I was in need of some help. Here is the thing, I really, really suck at Winforms coding. Give me a web application and I can...

We just added a new dropdown list to one of our forms, which has a javascript function to change the background colour of a textarea. And the UpdateModel() on our controller class promptly fell over ... It turns out that UpdateModel() requires your class...

Britain and America are two nations divided by a common language (George Bernard Shaw / Oscar Wilde) It could be said that the business and developers are two nations divided by a common language. If you listen to conversations between developers and...

Why is Ruby on Rails all the rage at the moment, and why do a lot of .NET people seem so defensive? Undoubtedly, there is a buzz in development right now, things are changing rapidly, possibly more rapidly than they have for a good number of years. New...

In many conversations, and in many comments here, you hear phrases like “well that’s not really suited to DDD” or “DDD isn’t the best fit for that problem”. You even see those kind of comments on my blog, and often they are posted by me. This obviously...

As I keep doing this on MVC projects, thought I may as well blog it, so the next time I need it I can find it myself :) To keep ASP.NET MVC controllers clean and organised, I find it much easier to split them so they handle only a single action each....

You may have missed the release of Oxite recently, and some of the hype and comments around it. Having now seen some absolutely ludicrous comments on the web chiming in about how good it is, I feel compelled to write my own short appraisal. Lets start...

I wrote a nice little charting component for our site recently, and needed to call a Javascript function in one View (the one that was the main page for charting), from another View (one that went off to the server using Ajax to load up a list of feeds...

I recently got brought on board to a new client where, true to form, a project was in a state of failure - everybody sort of knew it, but nobody would say it out loud. What Was Going Wrong? After my initial assessment, I made a quick decision that the...

During a discussion with our project manager earlier today, I used the phrase "Don't tell me how you want it to work, tell me what you want it to do" We were discussing user stories , and I was trying to get across what I wanted to see on...

Code quality is an abstract concept again, and can be defined may ways depending on how you perceive quality. A good discussion of the many aspects of code quality can be found on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_quality Some general...

There are many ways you can commit commercial suicide, but there is possibly no slower and more agonising death than that produced by attempting that great architectural objective, the single authoritative database to which all applications talk. The...

So my last post ruffled some feathers, but Steve hit the nail right on the head in his commments, and it was sort of the subtext of what I was saying: All this kerfuffle about "software craftsmen" and "code quality" and "best...